[Members] XSF membership: what does it mean?

[Dirk Meyer]

Peter Saint-Andre wrote:
> By contrast, I see the membership as something we need in order to
> maintain the XSF as a legal entity. We are a non-profit corporation
> that's defined as a membership organization, so we need members. But we
> don't limit participation to members (or employees of sponsoring
> companies), as too many closed industry consortia do. Instead, all of
> our important work takes place on open mailing lists, chatrooms, and
> sometimes IRL at the XMPP Summit meetings.

I see two different ways to do stuff:

1. The IETF. Everyone can write a draft, join a WG, and go to the IETF
   meetings. They have no membership because they do not need it.

2. A forum like DLNA only allows members to view specs. You have to pay
   be a member.

The first one is the free software way: everyone can play. And this is
what we do and what we should do. So from the writing-XEPs point of view
we need no members. We only need members because the XSF is a non-profit
corporation.

To summarize: everyone can play, it doesn't matter if you are a member
or not. But if you work on XEPs, it would be *nice* to join because the
XSF needs members to exist.


Dirk

-- 
panic("Aarggh: attempting to free lock with active wait queue - shoot
 Andy");
	2.0.38 /usr/src/linux/fs/locks.c